


No Lies, No Pretending

by 10moonymhrivertam



Category: London Spy
Genre: M/M, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-06
Updated: 2017-05-06
Packaged: 2018-10-28 13:45:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10832502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/10moonymhrivertam/pseuds/10moonymhrivertam
Summary: Danny went to bed alone, only to wake staring into Alex's eyes. It has to be a dream, Danny tells himself, because if it isn't a dream, it must be a trick. It's impossible for him to have woken up two years in the past...isn't it?





	No Lies, No Pretending

**Author's Note:**

> The cover is by the lovely themuller13

 

 

* * *

 

Danny wandered through the house, making sure the lights were off before bed. Once the house was dark, he strained his ears for any out-of-place noises. The silence made his hair stand on end, but he decided he’d trust it. Danny headed for bed, stripping down to his boxers but leaving the ever-present data drive on its leather cord around his neck. He slipped under the covers, holding onto the data drive, and reluctantly let his eyes slide shut, bracing against an inevitable nightmare.

* * *

 

His eyes opened to meet blue eyes. Suddenly, his stomach churned as the remembered smell of two-week-old decomposition wafted through his nostrils as though it were _that day_ all over again. He scrambled back, fell out of bed, and curled up there on the floor - forehead against his crossed wrists, his arms braced against the floor, his knees tucked under him.

“Danny?” a concerned voice asked.

Danny shook his head sharply, his wild curls tossed by the motion.

“This is a dream,” he muttered.

“What?” The man on the bed asked. “Danny, what is it?”

“This has to be a dream, because if it isn’t a dream, it’s a trick.”

“A trick?” Legs swung over the side of the bed, but the man didn’t move to touch Danny, for which Danny was grateful. “Why would this be a trick?”

“The blog that Frances and I are keeping,” he said, voice muffled slightly by the floor.

“Who’s Frances?”

“Frances Turner,” Danny said. The man above him went rigid. “It’s a trick, because they’ll never leave me alone as long as I’m telling the truth about you - about _Alex_ ,” he said quickly, firmly. The man above him couldn’t be his Alex. Alex was dead. “And no one will listen to Frances because MI5 has painted her as so unstable she’ll follow anybody, and no one believes _me_ anymore, and if she’s saying what I’m saying, then clearly she’s so mad with grief she’ll listen to anybody,” Danny babbled into the floor, his breath picking up. He began to hyperventilate. The blue-eyed man - the man who looked like Alex, who had Alex’s eyes, but who couldn’t be Alex - slipped to the floor with Danny, tugging gently at his shoulders until Danny was kneeling, too - until their knees touched and Danny was upright and staring.

“I’d say you had a nightmare,” Not-Alex murmured, “except for what you said about Frances.”

Danny looked away, not wanting to respond to Not-Alex, but then....then he took in their surroundings. This flat - he knew this flat, but he hadn’t been around it in years. Silently, Danny stood up and looked around. And then he could hear it - two others wandering about outside the bedroom, the sounds of the neighbors in the building so different from the quiet of the house Scotty had left to him.

“Danny?” Not-Alex asked. More dazed than angry, Danny continued ignoring him. Danny went to the window and peeked around the shade, his eyes narrowing on a ground-floor flat that should’ve been empty, where shadows moved in the window. Danny just stared, for several long moments.

“Well. That’s not good,” he said eventually. He turned back to Not-Alex. Though it pained him to do it, he addressed him by his old lover’s name. “Alex, will you come with me? We need to go out. For a walk. Please -” he said when Not-Alex opened his mouth. “Please, don’t ask me questions just yet. Please, get dressed and come with me. We can go - anywhere. Just - trust me. I won’t pretend. I won’t lie to you. We just need to be somewhere that’s not here.”

Not-Alex stared for a while, but eventually he nodded. “Alright, Danny. A walk, or do you want to take my car?”

Danny hesitated. “...A walk,” he said eventually. The car was almost certainly bugged.

He and Not-Alex dressed. Danny exited the flat with single-minded determination, ignoring the teasing of his old flatmates, who seemed to be eons into his past some days. Danny led Not-Alex out of the flat, out of the main part of the city, out to the woods, out to a twisted tree that held memories just as horrid as the memories of _that day_ , but where he was certain no technology would find them without them noticing. Danny gestured for Not-Alex to sit on a log while Danny scrambled through his pockets for his phone. Once he’d found it and flicked through a couple of apps, _Stand By Your Man_ began to play softly. Enough to garble their conversation if their clothes had been bugged. Danny sat beside Not-Alex and was silent for several long moments. Not-Alex stared at him with a gaze so steady, so patient, that Danny’s heart ached. It could’ve been the real Alex. Danny looked away and began to speak.

“...When I went to bed last night,” he said quietly, “you’d been dead two years. I lived in Scotty’s house, and I went for fish ‘n’ chips with your Mum every Friday. We kept a blog together. We knew it was useless, that every entry would be taken down the second we put it up, but - it was helping us both heal.” Danny paused, floundering, at a loss. “MI5 wasn’t very pleased by your research, you see,” he added eventually. “No one was. Not any of the secret services, anyway. There’s a reason ‘secret’ is part of their name.” Danny paused a moment. “You would have flipped the whole world on its head,” he marvelled. “Put yourself out of a job,” he mused, his eyes flickering to the other man for barely a moment. “....Your job took you out first,” he said with a cold steel in his voice. “Locked you in a trunk and tried to paint you - Christ, Alex, they made you sound _awful_ . And they kept calling you Alistair, and I hated it, and I kept hating it once I knew it was the name Frances gave you.” Danny paused. The man by his side didn’t speak. “But I believed you. I believed you were Alex. That you were _my_ Alex and not Alistair-the-professional-dom.” A snarl crept into Danny’s voice. “They gave me hell for it, Alex. ....But I never stopped believing in you.”

Not-Alex was quiet. Except Danny was growing more and more sure that maybe it _was_ Alex. Possibly-Alex, then, he decided. Possibly-Alex spoke eventually. “...You know all that....and you’re still here?” he asked. Danny had been away from his voice so long he almost missed the wonder and anxiety buried in the words.

“I’ll always be here,” Danny promised, reaching over to cup Possibly-Alex’s face. Possibly-Alex leaned into the touch, and Danny’s heart warmed. “If this isn’t a trick...I’m going to save you,” he promised, bringing up his other hand.

“There are theories,” Alex said haltingly. “Scientific and mathematical ones....about parallel universes and strings.”

“And you think _I_ unlocked the key to them?” he asked with a tinge of amusement, shaking his head. What would a recovered drug addict working in a warehouse have inadvertently figured out that a mathematical genius of Alex’s caliber hadn’t?

“I’m simply saying,” Alex murmured, and Danny sobered a little, smiling, flattered that Alex believed him capable of such feats.

“Thank you, Alex.” Danny leaned in and kissed him, prepared to take on the world and whatever it may throw at them.

**Author's Note:**

> The cover is by the lovely themuller13


End file.
